Changing of the Guard
by herworship429
Summary: Bruce Wayne was dead, but there was still so much for him to do. Plans to make. People to look after. And conversations to be had.
1. Chapter 1

A little attempt at filling in some missing pieces (I won't say plot holes) towards the end of TDKR regarding the Batman's legacy.

As usual, I don't own the characters, etc. Just borrowing stuff from whoever does own them.

Enjoy!

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Watching the Batman fly off, toting the ticking time bomb that would have been Gotham's end beneath his strange helicopter, Jim Gordon was struck with a sense of déjà vu. They had done this before, hadn't they? When he and the masked vigilante he only now knew was in fact Bruce Wayne had made their pact of secrecy with Harvey Dent lying dead at their feet, when they agreed to lie to the people of Gotham for the sake of the greater good; the problem, of course, with the Noble Lie was that it inevitably backfired. He had spent eight years waiting for the other shoe to drop and the world to go to hell again, and he had gotten his wish.

Eight years ago, he had watched the Batman disappear into the shadows, and had nearly been crushed beneath the weight of their lies. This time, he watched Bruce Wayne disappear into a supernova with no way back. There would be no masked hero waiting in the wings next time. That there would be a next time was something that Gordon took for granted, because the world was full of psychopaths and deranged maniacs, and greedy men eager to take advantage of a wounded animal, and that was exactly what Gotham was at the moment. The city crouched beneath the first rays of dawn, licking its wounds and trying to put what was left of itself back together, even as the vultures circled above.

Even with most of Bane's army rounded up and shipped off to prisons outside the city until Blackgate could be repaired and rebuilt, there were more loose ends than Gordon could even quantify. His chief concerns included hundreds of incidents of petty crimes, missing persons, riots and killings that had followed in the wake of Bane's revolution, and he didn't have nearly enough manpower to handle all of it. On top of that, at least seven of Blackgate's most dangerous prisoners, the ones who had been held in Arkham until after the passing of the Dent Act, had vanished during the coup; Crane had been the only one who showed his face in the city, presiding over his nightmare court at the Stock Exchange, but the other escapees included the Joker. The thought of that psycho running around somewhere sent a chill down his spine.

He wasn't sure they could come out of this without the Batman; at the very least, having an ally who wasn't chained by the law would have been extremely helpful. But the Batman was gone, and there wasn't much use crying over it. He'd just have to make due.

Gordon returned to his sparse apartment only when he started misspelling things on his reports, or he couldn't keep his eyes open, and even then, he didn't sleep all that much. Mostly, he sat at his kitchen table, his hand hovering over the telephone. He wanted to call his wife, the kids; he wanted to tell them he was fine, let them know he had survived the occupation. But only once had he managed to actually dial the number, and when a male voice he didn't recognize answered the phone, he had hung up. She hadn't called when reports surfaced that the city was no longer under nuclear threat; as far as he knew, she hadn't called into any police stations, hadn't tried to contact the mayor or anyone else who might have been in charge to see if he had survived. She hadn't bothered, and what was the point if they didn't care enough to even ask?

He still sat at the table staring at the telephone every night.

But one night, three months after the bomb went off over the Atlantic, a ghost paid him a visit. One minute he had been staring at the phone over an untouched bottle of beer, and the next he saw a shadow move out of the corner of his eye. He was on his feet, gun in hand faster than he could believe himself, the weapon pointed into the dark living room.

"Show yourself! I'm armed!" he called out.

Bruce Wayne stepped out of the shadows, looking worse for wear, but beneath the half-healed cuts and bruises, a wry smile stretched across his face.

"Having an off day?" Gordon asked. His voice was even, a tinge of amusement even colored it. This should have shocked him, but it didn't. Gordon was more surprised that he had come without a mask.

Wayne shrugged, "It's been a rough few months."

"Tell me about it," Gordon lowered his gun and slid it back into the holster on his belt as he took his seat once more, "You're supposed to be dead."

"As far as most of Gotham is concerned, I am," Wayne took a seat at the table, "I did manage to make some last-minute provisions to my will. One of them, in particular, might need your help."

"Is that right?" Gordon pulled his glasses off and absently used his shirt sleeve to clean the lenses, "So… you're leaving. The Batman really is dead."

Wayne cocked his head to the side and stared at Gordon for what seemed like a very long time. There was something of a mischievous grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, but it was gone before Gordon could ask just what was so damn funny about what he had just said.

"The Batman can't die," Wayne sat back with a shrug, "The Batman is an idea. He's a symbol. You can't kill that. But Bruce Wayne is dead, yes."

"The point is he's not coming back," Gordon looked towards the drawn curtains over the kitchen window, a heavy sigh escaping him.

"I didn't say that," Wayne was giving him that funny half-smile again, "You just have to give him some time to learn the ropes. Provisions, remember?"

"What provisions?"

"The kind where I leave the cowl to someone else. A successor, if you will. Someone else who is willing to be the symbol that could unite this city."

"Who?" Gordon was honestly surprised. From what he had heard about him, Wayne was a paranoid SOB if there ever was one; he had never struck Gordon as the type to entrust something like this to someone else.

"Better if you don't know," Wayne gave the commissioner an apologetic look as he continued, "For his safety, and yours."

"What does he need my help for?"

"Do you really think I did all of it without any help?" Wayne asked with a pointed look, "I had significant advantages that he won't. For one thing, his training was a lot more… conventional than mine was. And he had a lot less of it. The tech may not be as expendable and unending as it once was. He's going to need support. He's going to need allies. Which is where you come in."

Wayne was gone within the hour, once again melting into the shadows. Gordon fell asleep at the kitchen table, and when he woke the next morning, he was half-sure it had all been some kind of bizarre dream. He'd just been sleep-deprived, overworked, that was all. A hallucination born of desperation, because he had been there, he had _seen_ the Batman fly off into oblivion.

By that evening, after a long, hard day rounding up what was left of Bane's criminal army, he had convinced himself that it had only been a dream. Bruce Wayne had not turned up at his apartment in the dead of night to tell him that he had left a successor to look after Gotham in his absence. The Batman was not coming back. He was as dead as the smashed signal on the roof of the station-

"Well, I'll be damned," Gordon murmured, setting his file down and running a hand over the newly-repaired metal bat welded over a brand new searchlight. He imagined if he asked someone downstairs where the new light had come from, they would have asked him what he was talking about. No matter. Gordon didn't need to ask.

So much had changed, for worse and for better, and Bruce Wayne was gone again, but this time Gordon didn't feel like he was waiting for the world to end all over again. The Batman hadn't abandoned Gotham, and Wayne had had a plan all along. He could only hope that this mystery successor was up to scratch.

But for the first time in a very long time, Jim Gordon _had_ hope. And for now, that was enough.

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Reviews are nice, if you feel like it.


	2. Chapter 2

Just so y'all are forewarned, I'm not a very diligent updater, usually (readers of my Coulson memorial story in the Avengers category can attest to that), I just already had this written. Alfred will be the third and final chapter (probably), but NaNoWriMo will be monopolizing my time come next week, so it could be a while.

AllieKatheryn- yay for reviews! I totally was not trying to be vague or mysterious about the identity of Bruce's successor... I guess it was just so obvious in my head, and I didn't think that he would tell Gordon anyway. It will be confirmed below :)

As for the disclaimers... yada yada, I don't own Batman or anything related.

And... yeah. I'll turn things over to Mr. Fox.

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Lucius Fox was a very smart man. This wasn't hubris on his part; it was just a fact. He was a hard man to… well, fox, to use a well-worn pun. But he had to admit, Mr. Wayne had a habit of pulling fast ones on him when he least expected it.

When he set his technicians to repairing the autopilot function on the Bat, the very last thing he expected them to report was that it had been repaired six months prior; he had played off his surprise with a shrug and told them to shut it down and put it away. "Shut it down and put it away" had been the general order since he had regained control of the company and the soldiers and police support sent in from the mainland had begun returning the Tumblers and other weapons stolen from Applied Sciences. The defense department had been breathing down his neck ever since the occupation had revealed the fact that Wayne Enterprises appeared to have been gathering an enormous stockpile of high-tech military prototypes in the basement, and Fox couldn't exactly explain that he had been arming Gotham's masked vigilante, could he? He had put them off by telling the simple truth: that Wayne Enterprises had the prototypes in various locations around the world, and Fox had been trying to consolidate them. He had never intended for them to fall into the hands of Bane and his army of miscreants; in fact, that was precisely what he had been trying to prevent. The upside of the equation, for the company's finances at least, was renewed interest in some of the prototypes that had been deemed unrealistic to put into production; the Tumblers were of particular interest to a pushy Army general who wouldn't stop calling Fox with pointed questions.

He imagined somebody would start calling about the Bat before long; he still hadn't decided what he would say if and when anyone realized that the Batman's high-tech helicopter had come from Wayne Enterprises as well.

But for the moment, he wasn't the CEO and acting President of Wayne Enterprises. He was just one of Bruce Wayne's friends, paying his respect at a funeral with exactly four guests. Well, four-and-a-half; Bruce's jewel-thief girlfriend was lurking in the tree line, watching the proceedings with solemn, teary eyes. If Gordon or Blake noticed, they didn't seem inclined to arrest her, and Alfred was too wrapped up in his own grief to notice much of anything.

Gordon finished reading, and the three of them filed out of the cemetery, leaving Alfred to pay his respects. Gordon was talking to Blake, so Fox decided to take a little stroll around the grounds while he waited for Alfred. He wandered up onto the rear veranda of the manor, peeking into an empty drawing room. It had been shut up, as soon as Alfred got back to Gotham and Gordon had told him what had happened to Bruce; through the window, Fox could see the shapes of furniture covered in white sheets standing sentinel, but otherwise only the light streaming in from outside lit the room. The power had been shut off months ago.

A shadow moved inside, and it made Fox jump. His imagination, it had to be. After learning about the autopilot (a detail he had neglected to tell Alfred; the poor man was fraught with enough grief as it was), it had to be that. Those few closest to Bruce had known just how slyly self-destructive he could be. The boy would hold up the Greater Good as his reasoning and insist he didn't have a death wish, but... well, there were ways to rationalize the decision. What if the autopilot malfunctioned before the Bat got far enough out over the bay? What if something went wrong with the navigation system and it veered off course? To that logic, the only solution that guaranteed Gotham's safety was that someone pilot it. And that was just the sort of logic Bruce would grab onto. So it must have only been his eyes playing tricks on him; no one was in the house, except perhaps Bruce Wayne's ghost. And Fox had nothing to fear from him.

Still, he lingered by the window, some part of him insisting the larger part was wrong, that things were not as they appeared, and someone was in the house. He saw the shadows dart by twice more before he conceded to that nagging voice in the back of his mind. His brow furrowed as he weighed his options, but he didn't hesitate much longer. He had a suspicion.

He found the French doors unlocked, which was odd; Alfred had locked up the place, having opted to stay in a hotel in the city instead of the house. He pushed one of the doors open and slipped inside. Another shadow led him up the main staircase, though the house and into the East Wing that had been Bruce's home for the past three years or more. He stopped when he stepped into a sparsely-furnished study.

"Mr. Wayne?" he asked, his voice echoing in the silent room. For a long time, there was no answer. He began to think that he was wrong; but just as he turned and stepped back out into the hallway, he heard a throat being cleared.

"Sorry, Mr. Fox," Bruce was standing next to the antique piano, looking a little ragged, but most definitely alive. Fox didn't bother asking how he had survived; the answer was obvious.

"So. The mystery of the autopilot explained," Fox raised one eyebrow, "That's an awful thing to do to Alfred, you know. He's the one who should know that you're still around."

"He will," Bruce promised with a faint smile, "Don't worry about Alfred. I needed to talk to you before I… disappear."

"Uh-huh," Fox sighed, "Of course you do. I can get you a Bat, if you came for a stealthy escape route."

"Not necessary, for me at least," Bruce pushed the study door shut and leaned against the piano.

"For you," Fox repeated, eyes narrowing, "But for someone else?"

"There_ is_ a reason I'm letting everyone think I'm dead when I'm obviously not," he pointed out with a wry, tired smile, "He's going to need help. It wasn't easy being Batman, even for me, and he won't have the same advantages I did."

"Which is where I come in, I would imagine," Fox nodded, the cogs in his mind already beginning to turn. He reached into the pocket of his coat and retrieved a pad of paper and a pen, jotting down a list so he wouldn't forget, "Mr. Blake is a little shorter than you. The suit will need to be modified. I'll work on digging up some more weaponry, seeing as I doubt he had years of martial arts training to fall back on."

Bruce's eyes widened a little, but he didn't seem overly surprised that Fox had so quickly deduced the identity of his heir, "No killing, remember."

"Of course, Mr. Wayne," Fox smiled, "Wayne Enterprises is still in a fair state of chaos, I should be able to equip your young friend without too much trouble. For now, at any rate. Does he know?"

Fox could have been asking him a hundred different questions, but he had a feeling that Bruce understood what he meant. The dead man shook his head, "He doesn't know that I'm alive, no. And he doesn't know what I'm going to ask him to do. Yet."

"But you will be _asking_," there was a hint of a threat in Fox's voice, because as willing as he had always been to take part in this vigilante business, it had been Bruce's choice to take up the mantle of the Batman, to take on the risk and the general lack of reward. He would not be party to Bruce shoving the cowl onto someone else's unwilling shoulders so that he could make an escape.

"Of course," Bruce nodded, his expression serious, "But I know what the answer will be."

"And Alfred? You'll tell him what you're planning? I can only do so much."

"Alfred, and Gordon, yes," Bruce wandered to the window, looking down on the back lawn, "I'm sorry to spring this on you. And I'm sorry that I have to ask so much of you. Of all of you. But Gotham still needs the Batman. It doesn't need me."

"I don't know about that, Mr. Wayne," Fox joined him, his gaze drifting to the cemetery that was just visible in the distance. He could see Alfred's stooped figure maneuvering through the little iron gate, "And that would be my cue. Can we reach you, if we need to?"

"I'll be in touch," he smiled faintly, "Thank you, Mr. Fox. For all that you've done."

Fox returned the smile and nodded towards the edge of the forest, where he thought he could still see a flash of black among the trees, "Your girlfriend know you're still alive? Or was she just hiding in the woods for dramatic effect?"

A shadow and a strange look crossed Bruce's face, and Fox wasn't much surprised when he glanced out the window again and then looked back to find himself alone in the study, the door slightly ajar. If he was very, very quiet, he could hear faint footfalls coming from elsewhere in the house.

So that was that. All that remained of Bruce Wayne in another angry orphan out for justice, in the three old lions tasked to look after him, and in the sounds of fading footsteps echoing through an empty house. Fox could imagine a million scenarios in which things were different, in which Alfred had not been left in ruins, in which Bruce had chosen to stay, and the Batman would never have need for a successor.

But there was no sense reminiscing and ruminating on that which could not be changed.

Fox had a legacy to tend to, after all.

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